Windows 8 Hangs On Boot / Shutdown And Won't Sleep

Mar 17, 2013

I upgraded from Windows 7 (64-Bit) to 8 (64-Bit). When I had 7 it took about 10 seconds to boot, but now it can take anywhere from 2-5 mins, also it doesn't shutdown (I have to hold down the power button) and it never sleeps (the screen goes off but the laptop remains running).

Every now and then when I shut down my computer it will show "Restarting" for about 1-5 seconds (My pc is fast) and the display will shut off. But the computer will still be running, the HDD and all are running. I have to do a hard shutdown by holding the power button.

I have found this in the event logger:

"The system firmware has changed the processor's memory type range registers (MTRRs) across a sleep state transition (S5). This can result in reduced resume performance."

Source: Kernel-Power

I heard it having something to do with "fast startup" or "Quick Boot" I am unsure.

For the past few days my laptop, a Windows 8 Samsung model with Intel core i5, has been acting up for the first time since I purchased it last year. I've been away on vacation for three weeks, and have not used it during that period, so when I returned the system naturally installed itself with new updates. But ever since then, my audio driver has not worked whenever I initially booted the computer (i.e. there is no sound); interestingly, YouTube videos also refuse to load. It is only when I restart the computer, or disable then enable the driver manually, that things return to normal. Or, at least, somewhat.

For when I try to shutdown the system, the computer hangs and just doesn't shutdown. It seemingly performs the processes required for it, the screen darkens, but the system does not power off. The first time I had to manually turn off the power, but last night I simply let it continue with the hope that it would shutdown eventually. It did... but only because my laptop battery ran out.

Before System Restore recommended, I tried that route already. No matter which restore point I used, the system told me that each restore was unsuccessful due to the possibility that my C drive was corrupt. I don't know if that's the case - certainly something is wrong - but I'm at a loss as to exactly what to do.

Installed Windows 8 Pro clean install just kept my files. Now, every time I resume from sleep it hangs at a black screen for what seems like ever. Only way to start is to hold power button to turn off then restart it.

Something changed in the last week or so that has caused the system to sometimes not automatically go to sleep and when it does not go to sleep after the selected time it won't shutdown either. When this happens and I try to shutdown the system it shuts down but then immediately reboots on it's own. This has only happened two or three times in the last week but I never had this issue until recently! It appears like I can either turn off the power via the power supply and restart to make the problem go away or if I manually put it to sleep and wake up it will power down - at least that is what worked the last time this happened. I did install update KB2962409 around the time the problem appeared?

Windows 8.1(full fresh install) will not go to sleep/shut down etc. This has been happening since I installed 8.1 a few weeks back. It works/worked fine in Windows 7 and windows 8.0 till this install. I have narrowed it down to the Ethernet Chipset ( on board Realtec RTL8110 SC )

All the settings in the device manager the powercfg commands etc etc. Disabling in device manager does not work either ...

Then today I have found out that when you take the Ethernet Cable out of the computer............it goes to sleep. Why did I not try this before? ? ? When I remove the cable from the router, it stays awake when plugged in at the computer end.

Once asleep it stays that way and if I get it to sleep by other means - PWR ButtonSleep Option in W 8.1, it stays sleeping.

Any magic keystroke combination for "Sleep" or is there anyway to create one? I know about Win+I then Power then Sleep.

Any option to stop scheduled tasks or other triggers that "Wake" your computer from sleep? I find my computer running in the morning after putting it to sleep at the end of the previous evening! I have reviewed all 41 scheduled tasks created by Windows and installed applications and "apps" and found none that have the Wake Computer check box checked. What's annoying is the fact that once woken the computer does not go back to sleep again! I am using the supplied balanced Power plan.

I started to notice a change with the clock every now and then. I finally concluded that the clock does not change during sleep, restart, or shutdown.

My computer goes to sleep often, and when it wakes up from sleep, the time is the same as when it was prior to sleeping, not synchronizing to the correct time after waking up.

I've done some research and I fell onto the official Windows thread where they explained the use of third-party-utility will cause this problem.

The big problem here is that I don't have the single clue which ones. I tried uninstalling some, not sure if I left any utilities out. The utilities I've used are the general ones for visual styles and themes.

I was running Windows 7 home premium on my pc on a 2TB hdd, and it was running fine, I had a 500GB as a separate hdd aswell, attached at the time. So I installed windows 8 on the 500GB hdd, activated it, tried to restart, I restarts, but now in both windows 8 and 7, I am having trouble:

In windows 8:

Press shutdown, it does nothing, press restart, it restarts, press sleep, it restarts.

Serious problem after 8.1 update from windows 8. My Dell notebook won't sleep when idled or lid closed, nor will it shutdown. The screen turns black, and the LED blacklight and fan are still on and cannot revert to normal mode unless I do a hard reset.

Updated to latest drivers and windows update, to no avail. Checked sleep and power options, and they're still the same as before.

I just upgraded to Windows 8 Enterprise x64 RTM yesterday, and have noticed an annoying problem that wasn't present under Windows 7 Enterprise x64 (which I was running previously). Specifically, the machine will not sleep, will not hibernate and will not shut down. When any of the three are attempted, they appear to succeed, but then the computer will immediately wake up again. In the case of a shutdown, the computer will actually power completely off and then start right back up immediately. I never used to sleep the machine in Windows 7, but I know the hibernation used to work and certainly shutting down did as well, as I shut the machine down every night.

In the event viewer, I have a Power-Troubleshooter event (ID 1) every time the machine wakes back up from an attempted sleep, hibernation or shutdown, but it always indicates that the wake source is "Unknown." I have tried unplugging every single Ethernet, USB and eSATA cable from the PC until nothing was left plugged in but the monitors, audio out and AC power -- just in case a device was sending a magic packet or some kind of wake-up signal. Even so, I still experienced the same immediate waking problems on shutdown, hibernate or sleep.

I was able to solve the inability to shut down by disabling Windows 8's "Fast Startup" option, which as I understand it uses a kind of hybrid hibernation. Hibernation is not working properly on my system. At least with "Fast Startup" disabled, I can actually shut the machine down. It's a pity though because I really liked Fast Startup's performance.

Full system specs are in my profile, but it's kind of an old box I put together in late 2006. Core components of possible relevance to this issue are an Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard and Seasonic S12 600W power supply. The motherboard is running the very latest BIOS revision (3002). My Windows 8 installation was an in-place upgrade of my previous Windows 7 installation; everything seems to be working fine except for the weird power stuff.

Here's one other thing I should note, which concerns me somewhat as it is related by definition. In the P5W DH Deluxe's BIOS, there is an "ACPI 2.0 Support" option which defaults to "Disabled". Back when I built the machine I left it alone so it has been disabled this whole time. During my troubleshooting of these issues earlier tonight, I decided to try switching it to "Enabled" to see if it would have any effect. It has not fixed the issues at all, but it does make me wonder. Is there any way to tell whether Windows 8 has correctly identified the system as being ACPI 2.0 compliant? I think I remember in the old days WinXP used to have to be completely reinstalled when that switch was flipped.

Additionally, and much to my consternation, I can no longer use Wake On LAN. I've actually fixed the WoL issue. I had to go into Device Manager, find my network adapter and get the properties of it -- then, on the Advanced tab, find the property called "Wake From Shutdown" and set it to "On". This must have been either a new property in the Windows 8 driver for my network adapter, or was reset back to Off for some reason when I did the Win7 -> Windows 8 upgrade.

It's an Asus G75VW-BBK5 I got in November of 2012 (refurbished) running Windows 8.1 x64.

It always plays coy with shutting down/sleeping. Whether I am closing the lid, shutting down/sleeping from the menu/tapping the power button, it will always log off, give me the message that it is restarting/sleeping/shuttingdown in the center of the screen for a few seconds, turn off the screen, and then continue to run, such that if I tap a key or use the touchpad, it will instantly turn on the screen and give me a logon prompt as if I had never turned it off (but only logged off).

The only way to shut it down is to hold the powerbutton for a few seconds or remove the battery while it is unplugged.

Other than this, I can't complain of any outstanding issues.

I have attached the diagnostics usually requested for a BSOD troubleshoot.

If I remember correctly, you can ignore the dump file. That was from a BSOD caused by the secondary SSD being jarred loose when I wasn't gentle enough with it.

Other than this issue, there is no problem this laptop. I have, of course, run powercfg -requests to see if any processes were causing it. Nothing showed up.

How to get it to start shutting down/sleeping properly? I'm getting tired of finding it still running in my backpack an hour or two after I packed up. Sometimes I will only know that something is wrong when the backpack is hot or when I see it show up in my list of active computers on Teamviewer when I am using a different computer.

Brand new Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook with Windows 8. 256 SSD, 8 gigs of memory, i5-3317, non touch screen. Working fine for 2 months and now will not boot after Dell logo. Have been on tech support three times still not solved. They sent a USB recovery drive and does not boot. They sent an optical drive and the windows recovery disc; still not working! Not a novice at this but fully stumped. Cannot get to a C prompt, cannot get into Safe mode. Am able to get into BIOS but is limited in what can be done there. Diagnostics says everything is fine. Am ready to go back to Windows 7 until they work the bugs out.

About couple hours ago I decided to install updates on my Windows 8 desktop. I had about 12 or so. Can't remember which ones now. My update settings are to notify me of the updates but not to install them. So I manually clicked, yes, install. Then after a little while the updates window showed up in red telling me that some updates did not install. So I decided to reboot the desktop to clear it up...

The desktop now hangs up on this very screen: (New windows logo and a spinning thing)

That spinning thing keeps spinning, no matter how long I let it run like this. The HDD light first blinks but then about half a minute in, it stops doing so. I believe that the fan inside spins audibly louder too.

OK, so if I reboot by holding down the power button for a few seconds, it begins rebooting again. For the second time it showed something like "Automatic repair" or something. (I need to say that my solid state drives have Bit locker set up on them.) So after entering the bit locker keys I was presented with an option to do repairs. Since I didn't feel like I needed to do system restore I declined and chose to keep booting into Windows.... again nothing.

So I repeated the process above, but this time it did not offer me to do system restore and instead, it showed something in the tune of "Repair windows". So I chose it, and it then showed this window:

Now I tried it two times already, and no matter what I choose, it hangs up just like I showed on the screenshot above -- with that white border around whatever I choose... How do I get my desktop back?

upgrading my old PC to Windows 8, because I absolutely cannot afford to buy new, and I don't want to get caught out when Microsoft pull the plug on XP.

I have a copy of Windows 8 64 bit, which I want to try to get installed. My system has an Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 which (according to the Intel website) supports Windows 8. However when I try to install Windows 8, I can boot from the CD but it doesn't go any further than the splash screen with the blue Windows 8 logo. I don't get any other information as to what the problem is.

What I have tried:

1. I checked that "Execute Disable" was turned on in my BIOS.2. I unplugged all USB devices except Keyboard and Mouse3. I tried booting from a USB DVD drive.

None of the above worked. I can't do an upgrade install from within Windows XP because it is 32 bit.

By the way I have included the log from the SysInfo utility in case it is useful:

I have been using my asus laptop but recently started blue screening. When trying to shut it down the screen will go black, but the system lights remain on and it remains running, however irresponsive. It also began showing a blue screen with the warning "Driver power state failure".

When I turn the power on, my desktop PC (a Hewlett-Packard) goes into a BIOS startup routine that says "Preparing Automatic Repair" and then "Diagnosing Your PC" which has to finish before it will load Windows or any OS. I've seen it before, and usually it just takes a few seconds. But now it's stopping at the "Diagnosing" message and won't go any further. I turn it off and on, and it does the same thing again. I can get into the BIOS menus and choose other options like booting from another drive, recovery options, etc. but no matter what I choose it starts the BIOS over again and gets hung up on the "Diagnosing" step, so I can't boot ANYTHING.

Any way to bypass or break out of this BIOS startup loop so I can get to Windows?

So what happens is you have the charger plugged in and was indicating it is charging and you start up the machine, it would come up automatic repair for about 10 seconds then shutdown and then after it shuts down the light indicating it's charging turns off.

I assumed it was just low on charge so I left it charging for an hour and I tried again and had gotten the same results so I'm sure it's not a charge fault but rather a software failure somewhere during boot.

My system has been on completely since 8.1 and has never needed to restart until I did some updates today.

Now I'm not really concerned about shutdown or restart as I will manually shut down the PC if I'm going somewhere for an extended time "I never leave anything on, power for the entire house is shut off" and will shut it off until I get back.

But the slow login is really killing me as it used to take 1 second to hear that little "tick" from the speakers and I'd see the login/splash page, but as of today I will hear that "tick" but the windows dotted circle will spin for oh.. 30 seconds than I can see my splash screen.

I've scanned my C: and D: disks, ran defender, antivirus, etc and all came back fine and I even have 90GB free out of my 120gb drive.

I have a PC that I have been running Win 8 Consumer Preview since it was available. I have two HD's partitioned to dual boot Windows XP SP3 and Win 8, with Win 8 set as default. I have been running Win 8 over 95% of the time. Everything has been working fine until this morning.

When I came out of screensaver in Win 8 and attempted to get to my login page nothing happened. So i shut down using the power button, after that Win 8 would not start, nor could I get to the dual boot screen. After a number of tries i finally got the dual boot screen and attempted to start in XP. XP nearly completely started (I had desktop, task bar, desktop icons, etc), but then it shut down as well and displayed a blue screen and error message "A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.".

I have tried starting from my XP install disk with the same error message ("A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer." ). I have tried starting from USB flash drive that has my Win 8 Install. It is the same USB flash drive that i originally used to install Win 8. It hangs at the 'fish' screen. I have tried just starting the machine several times, but it hangs at 'Preparing Automatic Repair'.

I have everything disconnected (printers. ethernet, USB Wifi adaptor). The only things connected are my keyboard/mouse, speakers, and (1) 17" monitor. I normally run a 23" widescreen and the 17" monitor.

I have disconnected the slave HD and tried booting with XP install disk and USB Win 8 with no success.

Currently, both HD's are connected. I tried a normal start up and the machine is stuck at 'Preparing Automatic Repair'

This has never happened before such that I could not boot into either XP or the XP Install CD or the Win 8 USB Install flash drive, in order to attempt repairs to MBR or Win 8 troubleshooting diagnostics.

Complete error message on Blue screen:

"A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSk /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

Now for the problem when I receive the laptop it was preinstalled with window 8 and on the first boot it took around 5 to 6 mins to boot to desktop..I reinstalled the windows considering it to be the bloatware fault..

The problem gets solved but after i download alienware osd drivers , alienware command center and nvidia drivers the delay is back ..

It starts with a bsod (your pc ran into problem)error window minidump memory.dmp.etc and after that windows boot restart and shutdown after almost 5 to 10 mins..

In the duration of delay there is no hdd activity and after 3 to 5 minutes when the hdd gets actives it boots to desktop in 5 secs..

I just got back from vacation andwent to turn on my pc which worked before on my Gigabyte GA78LMTS2 and now cant boot into Windows, instalation media, anything. it just hangs on the BIOS load screen. I am using AHCI for my sata.

Today I was shutting down my computer because I received the issue of 'plugged in, not charging...' once again. When it was shutting off everything shut down but the power was still on (the blue light on my laptop keyboard was on, it's off when the laptop is off).

I then decided to force-shut down my laptop by holding down the power button. After doing that I tried to turn it back and it refused to go past this screen:

[IMG] [URL] ......

After waiting for a while and returning from a shower it then went to a black screen which only showed my mouse icon. I installed windows 8 about 6 months ago from the official website for a fee; I didn't use a boot disk.

I have a custom built computer running Windows 8.1 64-bit. Recently, it stopped going to sleep on it's own (except the first time that the power plan is followed after boot). Otherwise, the monitor goes to sleep and that is it. After a bunch of other attempts and fixes, I have found that there is a driver that is blatantly disregarding powercfg settings (as seen here: [URL] .....). This has been going on for over a week. I have run sfc /scannow, and dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth with no luck.

I have a new Dell Inspiron 2350 windows 8.1 for the last week or so the usb wireless keyboard and mouse do not work when the system is booted or after coming out of deep sleep mode. I have to unplug the usb dongle and plug it in again for them to work.

I have already checked the powering saving settings for these devices, and it is disabled. There is no setting in the bios that I can see which would cause this. I have re-installed the drivers. I have tried different USB port. Dell have even replaced the keyboard and mouse and batteries, same problem.

When I leave my computer after a session, it automatically goes into sleep mode after a period of time and remains that way till I wake it up.

However when I manually put it to sleep ( via shutdown options) , it goes to sleep immediately but for only a while ( a few minutes) then it shows the desktop screen again. If I then leave it alone after it self awake , it goes back to sleep as described above.

On my operations such as restarting and shutting down it hangs and does nothing (I understand this a common problem but I have tried 3 solutions I found on the internet and none of them worked.) I still have to turn off my computor by holding the power button......

It isn't just shutting down however. Often when I try to open a program I have downloaded from the internet (the latest example being a driver scanner) nothing happens.

To try and fix these issues, I attempted to refresh Windows 8. Again it did nothing. After clicking the Get Started button it just hung on Preparing. I only left it for about 20 minutes, I thought something would have happened by then. The same is true for reinstalling Windows.

Sometimes Windows 8 just hangs after I look around and change some of the DVD related settings in VirtualBox. My host system is ubuntu and the guest is Windows 8.

When it hangs it is usually showing the Windows 7 desktop because I am always in that mode. I cursor to the lower left to try to the the mini-tiles but no matter what I do with the cursor, the mini-tiles do not appear. In fact, nothing works. I cannot launch any desktop applications.

In the past I solved this by simply having VirtualBox send the shutdown power-off signal. Windows is ignoring the shutdown signal. Is there a Windows-centric way to fix this problem so that I can do a Windows-centric shutdown in the normal fashion or otherwise resolve or prevent this problem?